1. Field of the Art
The present invention relates to a processing apparatus which is designed to process an object by jointly employing irradiation with a fast atom beam of atoms or molecules having a relatively large kinetic energy and irradiation with light energy, radical particles, ion beam, laser beam, X-rays etc.
2. Prior Art
FIG. 3 is a conceptual view showing a conventional processing apparatus that uses a fast atom beam. As illustrated in the figure, the conventional processing apparatus has a vacuum container 2 and a fast atom beam source 1 that releases a fast atom beam 3 into the vacuum container 2 so that the fast atom beam 3 is applied to an object 4 to be processed which is placed on a rotary table 5 disposed in the vacuum container 2. The vacuum container 2 has been evacuated by a turbo-molecular pump 7 or the like.
In the processing apparatus having the above-described arrangement, a gas which is highly reactive with the object 4 to be processed is generally used as a gas 6 for the fast atom beam 3 in order to increase the processing speed. For example, chlorine gas is used for processing GaAs. In addition, with a view to achieving uniform processing, the object 4 is irradiated with the fast atom beam 3 with the rotary table 5 being rotated.
Advantageous features of the processing method using a fast atom beam are as follows:
1) the directivity of the fast atom beam is excellent; PA1 2) it is possible to carry out processing under high-vacuum conditions and, thus, collision rate between the fast atom beam and other particles is low and precise processing is possible; and PA1 3) since non-charged particle rays are used, it is possible to process not only an electrically conductive material but also an insulating material, which cannot effectively be processed by an ion beam.
However, the above-described conventional processing apparatus using a fast atom beam suffers from the problem that since the quantity of radical particles or ion particles adsorbed on the surface of the object to be processed is small in comparison to the plasma processing technique, the processing speed is disadvantageously low.